Residents facing eviction from their homes in the Black Sea city of Sochi continued a hunger strike for the 16th consecutive day on Thursday, Kasparov.ru reports. The move is a last-ditch attempt by residents to bring attention to what they say is the unfair amount of compensation being offered to them by the local government in exchange for their property, which the city plans to use to construct the primary facilities for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

About 700 families in the Imeretinskaya Valley are affected by the evictions, which residents say violate their constitutional rights and lay waste to generations of labor and cultivation. Meanwhile, the construction of six ice facilities for the games is already underway.

The continued hunger strike looks set to collide with the Official International Olympic Committee Debriefing in Sochi that begins on Sunday, where organizers of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics will discuss with future organizers what lessons they learned from holding the games. Whether the media blockade will hold up with the influx of foreign journalists remains to be seen.

Information about the consequences of the ongoing construction in Sochi has been virtually absent from the Russian media, leading many of its victims to take drastic measures to make their stories known. The Imeretinskaya Valley residents’ hunger strike is at least the third protest of its kind to have been held since the beginning of the year; the other two involved construction workers forced to work months without pay. In April, the BBC reported that a senior scientist critical of how Olympstroy was failing to conduct proper geological surveying had fled the country out of fear of persecution.

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